The Courage to Start Working as a Freelancer

Tell us about your daily life.

I work at a regular company but find time to work as a freelancer. I wake up at 6:30 am, leave my flat at 7:30 am and begin work at my company at 8:00 am. I depart the office at 5:00 pm, arrive home and begin eating dinner at 5:30. After that I do freelance translation work.

Tell us about your professional work experience.

In fact, I have been curious about Japanese since I was in junior high school so that is when I started studying Japanese. My mother is a graduate of an arts college and I had an interest in the arts so I enrolled in an arts oriented high school. The arts high school had an exchange program with Japan that enabled me to get accepted into a Japanese arts university.

Kyoto City University of Arts graduation ceremony

After graduating I quickly began working at a Japanese design company where I worked for the next 5 years and launched my career in the design industry. However, after that I decided to return to my home country of Korea.

Busan,Korea

Back in Korea I struggled with deciding which career to pursue and eventually drifted toward part-time employment in translation and interpretation work and I discovered the joy of smoothly bridging the communication gap between the company and our clients and this was the beginning of my career in interpreting and translation. I am currently working in a large Korean company helping to interpret and translate material for Japanese engineers while on the side I do freelance work also. My future goal is to become a full-time independent freelancer.

Fukuoka,Japan

Why did I register on Workshift?

Most of the work I do at my current job is translation and interpretation using specialized vocabulary. Of course, I realize that this is a very valuable experience for me and that this “experience” is going to be important to my life because it will lead to more job opportunities in the future. I am hoping that the Workshift job site will lead to more jobs from many companies and clients and that is why I registered on their site. I have never worked independently before so I was a bit unsure about how this would work out but since I started here my studying time has increased. In fact, now that I have begun to do some independent work my discipline has improved because the need to provide accurate and mistake free content is important to receive good evaluations from my clients.

Florence, Italy

What about your future?

As I said in the previous paragraph, in the future I want to build on my experience in translation and interpretation work so that I will have a strong foundation to establish my independence as a freelancer and will not have to rely on working at a company. In that regard I think it is essential that I experience a wide variety of translation and interpretation work to expand my range of knowledge. With Workshift I hope to find a wide variety of jobs that will help me achieve a broad spectrum of work experience.

Milan, Italy

What is your impression of Workshift?

At first it was hard for me to imagine how to find work online and how to get the work done remotely. But when I actually began to use the Workshift site I learned that communication with the clients was smooth and that using the system was safe, easy and effective.

Colosseum in Rome

Was receiving payment smooth and easy?

I am still in the process of receiving payment but initially I did sense inconvenience that payment for sums above 5,000 yen were possible.

Any advice for new freelancers?

I think there are people who are worried about starting to freelance. I had no previous experience freelancing so I was apprehensive about trying it, but once I started using the Workshift system I got used to it and learned how to navigate the site and I would definitely recommend anyone to try it!